News Corp. exec discusses Fox Business

Chase Carey, the president and chief operating officer of News Corp., made the following comments about Fox Business Network during its earnings conference call on Tuesday:

As you know Fox Business channel has made nice strides. We still have some recent issues we have to deal with. It’s not distributed as widely as we would like it. So, we had to deal with that. It’s made some nice strides in rating and this guy looking at me the other day, it was what’s his name, you know [Lou Dobbs], they are (inaudible) counter part of the CNBC.

So it’s got a nice momentum to that business. This channel will be profitable this year, this fiscal year. So it’s on a good track. We’ve got to continue to build, fill out the distribution. We got good distribution but not so full distribution we need, but we think we have powers to addressing that in a reasonable short-term in the next year or two.

So it’s on a good track and we feel very good about it and feel very good about the progress we’ve made there and the opportunities to continue to build that business, and look we’ve got a great team leading the Fox News Group. The results they’ve got speak for themselves. So we have tremendous confidence in their ability. They have begin with building Fox News to really continue to distinguish the Fox business as a really exciting sister channel to the FOX News One.

When asked about incorporating Wall Street Journal, which currently has an agreement with CNBC but is also part of News Corp., content into Fox Business, Carey replied:

It’s not over yet, but it’s recently soon. I think we look for opportunities to do things that makes sense. So we’ve had discussions and I think we book the opportunistic.

Read the entire transcript here.